Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “Renna,” she said. “I know the course to Hades takes two days. We need to be there in one.”

  The ship broke into a consuming roar as Renna threw herself into new drive states. She shot forward at such a speed that the white points in the starglass flew up to meet them.

  Rennik ran to the control panels, his hands on the dials, his body twisted back toward Cade. “This is Renna’s maximum flightspeed,” he said. “She can’t operate for a full day at this speed.”

  “That’s for her to decide,” Lee said—taking someone else’s side against Rennik for what was probably the first time in her life.

  Renna roared even louder.

  “She would do this for you,” Cade said. “There are people you would have done it for, too.”

  She didn’t use Moira’s name. Judging by the sudden tightness of Rennik’s skin, and the visible force of the emotions rushing under it, she didn’t have to.

  “There’s still no plan,” Rennik said. “You can’t go into Hades without one. They’ll be waiting.”

  The Unmakers. That was why Rennik and Lee cared so much about Cade having a plan—they didn’t want to lose another member of their crew to the Unmakers. But Cade didn’t have the option of caring. Even if it was a trap—which it had to be—she would fly straight into it and snatch Xan out.

  Lee marched over. “We’re not going to let them have her.” She pushed her hair back and stared up into Rennik’s freshly iced-over features.

  “You say that as though we’ll have a choice. We hardly kept them back on our own ship . . . If they have the advantage . . .”

  Cade broke away from Rennik and Lee’s standoff and their talk of plans that, in the end, only mattered if they got her to Xan. “I need to do this,” she said. “It will never be smart, and you still have to let me.”

  Rennik stepped back.

  Cade smoothed her hands across the panels and shouted to Renna over the new din.

  “Hold the course.”

  Cade sat in the pilot’s chair, pretended to eat the food Lee brought for her, tried—and failed—to sleep. Blame streamed through her mind, as constant as the stars. Blame for the Unmakers, the Firstbloom scientists, herself.

  As if that wasn’t enough, Cade dropped back into Xan’s head for another round of pain.

  The automatic connection snapped on and Cade found herself in Xan’s cell. She suffocated inside of his head, his thoughts wrapped in a warm fog—one part drugs, two parts ache.

  He wasn’t being tortured this time, just nursing his wounds. Bruised to a rainbow of colors, not just black. Rot-purple and yellow, the green shine of meat gone bad.

  Everything hurt.

  Cade held on to the fact—true, but dissonant—that hurt meant hope. Hurt meant he was still alive.

  Hours later, and the control room sat empty except for Cade and the roar of Renna’s speed. Ayumi tiptoed in with Moon-White, looking small and pale, which was strange because she wasn’t really either. Maybe it was just the sheen from the starglass caught on her skin. She held the guitar out—it claimed the icy light and turned it into brilliance. But Cade had no interest in strings or frets.

  “I thought you might want to . . .”

  Ayumi pushed Moon-White so close that chords started calling out to Cade’s fingers.

  “I didn’t think tea would do the trick this time,” Ayumi said. “But this . . . I suspected it was the only thing in the universe that would make you feel better.”

  Cade didn’t deserve to feel better. Until she reached Hades, all she deserved was her share of Xan’s pain.

  “No,” Cade said. “Thanks.”

  Ayumi turned to leave, Moon-White a little too loose in her grip. Her steps lilted in a way that Cade didn’t like.

  “Wait.”

  Ayumi’s black curls flashed a circle as she turned, eyes clear and stuck fast on Cade.

  “Would it make you feel better?” Cade asked.

  Her shoulders pressed up in a small shrug. But Cade remembered now—how hard Ayumi had fallen for Moon-White’s music. Once Cade started to play, not one speck of glass had snuck into her eyes. Her arms and legs hadn’t wandered, disjointed.

  Cade grabbed the guitar, moved so fast that Moon-White swung on the strap around her neck.

  “Come here.”

  Cade rushed Ayumi to the starglass. “Look out there.”

  “You want me to—”

  “Just look.”

  Ayumi watched the stars, and Cade watched her. She stood outside the circle of perforated dark, strumming Moon-White and waiting for the change—the moment when Ayumi would slip out of herself and into the wide body of space. She strummed and waited. Waited and strummed.

  It didn’t come.

  Cade thought of her mother and the music that hadn’t been enough to cure spacesicks. It hadn’t been enough to save her from a glassed-and-gone fate. But Cade was different. Entangled.

  “Do you think . . . ?”

  The words were too huge to say out loud. Do you think I can cure you? Do you think I can cure other spacesicks? What if the scientists were right about the entangled? What if we can change life in the black?

  Cade knew that spacesicks detached from themselves in the face of the endless and the edgeless. Cade’s entanglement brought her into contact with Xan, but it also kept her tethered to herself—and that kept space from seeping into her cracks and settling down. What if this kind of connection could be opened up, shared somehow? What if it could bring people back to themselves?

  Instead of speaking, Cade worked to push these thoughts into music, with notes rising loose at the end like question marks.

  Ayumi looked over. She didn’t tear herself from the starglass. She didn’t shudder.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ayumi’s face sparked brighter than stars.

  “Yeah,” Cade said. “It is.”

  Cade slid out of the pilot’s chair eighteen hours into the hard-driven flight. She touched the control panel where the needles on Renna’s dials pressed to the limits.

  Cade tried to climb back into the chair, but Renna tightened up and turned it lump-hard and unbearable.

  She was telling Cade it was time for bed.

  “If you’re going to work this hard to get me to Hades,” Cade said, “I want to stay up with you.”

  The ground underneath her flashed so hot, she worried that the soles of her shoes would melt.

  “All right,” Cade said, too tired to fight an entire ship. “All right.”

  Cade headed down the chute. As she reached the panel, Ayumi crashed in from the dock with an armful of blankets and a toothbrush.

  She was moving in.

  Cade helped her settle into the other bottom bunk. Lee slept on the top, swimming through her dreams. Cade sat on the edge of her own bed and rested Moon-White across her knees. She picked out a quiet song that wouldn’t stir Lee. Ayumi stared at Cade, tuned in, awake. She strummed until the night felt deep, until she couldn’t see where it had started or where it might end.

  “I can’t play until dawn.” Cade scraped a hoarse laugh at her own joke. There was no dawn.

  “That will be enough,” Ayumi said.

  She sounded so sure that Cade believed it. Moon-White went under the bunk. But Cade let the notes stretch on in her mind—and she felt Ayumi’s mind, still open to her.

  “Can you hear that?” Cade whispered, without breaking the cord of sound between them.

  Ayumi’s breaths were soft and fit in the space between beats.

  “I hear that.”

  And for once, Ayumi didn’t leap forward to talk about how important this could be. She didn’t use the word ramifications. She was too perfectly tuned in. Cade stared across the space that separated their bunks. Lined her eyes up with the brown eyes across the room. Thought music at Ayumi until she fell asleep.

  Then Cade got up and walked the quiet ship. Her bare feet against the smoothness of the floors. She stepped with care, in case Renna decided to boil
the ground and send her back to bed.

  Cade ended up in front of the starglass again. Hades sat in the distance, a nest of coiled dark.

  Xan waited out there, needing her as much as he ever had. For the first time, Cade felt like she was bringing him something more than a rescue. More than survival—a hope for what came after.

  She sent music, long strands of it that she sailed to him. He listened, and sent nothing back.

  The border of Hades looked a lot like the rest of space.

  Open, black, silent.

  “How can you be sure this is it?” Cade asked. She’d slept three hours but she was up again, staring out from the brink of the control room. Rennik, Lee, Ayumi, even Gori stood lined up along the panels.

  “This is where we start to navigate around the black holes,” Rennik said. “Their gravity will drag us. With a field like this, we’ll be pulled in ten or twenty different directions, no matter how hard we work to stay the course.”

  He brought out a chart, three times as big as any chart Cade had ever seen, crammed with penciled calculations.

  “What’s that?”

  Rennik pushed it across the panels until it sat under Cade’s nose. “The course.” This time, she didn’t even have to look up to know what Rennik felt under all of that steadiness and calm. He sounded proud, with a shiver of nervousness at the edges.

  “All we need is Xan’s location and we’ll be prepared,” Rennik said. “Or as much as we can be, going into Hades.”

  Cade touched the dense, inked-in swirls on the chart and looked up at the space that stretched out in front of Renna. Still normal. Still empty. These things didn’t add up.

  “You’re not coming with me.”

  Three pairs of eyes swiveled to Cade. She could even feel Renna press some attention her way. The panel under her fingers flushed cold. Only Gori was the same as always—not staring when it actually made sense, staring the rest of the time. Lee shuffled her place with Rennik’s so she stood next to Cade. A skinny arm wrapped around her shoulders.

  “Of course we’re coming.”

  “The deal we made was a ride to Hades. I thought—”

  “You thought what? That we’d strand you on the doorstep of the most dangerous part of space?” Lee’s pale skin went the much-paler shade that only showed when things got serious. “Three things. One, that’s not even possible. I mean, we can’t force you out of the hatch and let you float the rest of the way.”

  “There’s Ayumi’s ship,” Cade said, and Ayumi nodded. “That’s the plan. She and I have a—”

  “Two,” Lee chimed in. “That’s no plan at all. If the Unmakers are waiting, which they are, and they have more than a handful of ships, which they do, there’s no way one tiny blip of tech is going to shake off their entire fleet.”

  Ayumi stood fast, but the rate of her blinking rose. She clamped her hands tight to keep her fingers from sparking.

  Lee pointed to the chart, and Cade noticed the two ships drawn in. One small and quick, darting around the gravity of the black holes. The other round and familiar, dotted with small dark eyes.

  “If you have another ship, a bigger one, not to mention one the Unmakers have boarded, to pull the interest, draw the fire . . . now that’s a plan.

  “Three,” Lee said. “Of course we’re coming.”

  That should have been the easiest point to argue. It was no point at all. For most of Cade’s life, she would have wanted to go into Hades on her own, because on her own was how she did things. But she had a new reason. A better one.

  “I can’t let you,” she said. “Too dangerous.”

  “We all picked danger a long time ago,” Lee said. “What’s one extra helping?”

  “But Lee . . . the Unmakers.” She didn’t have to hand the story of Lee’s sister back to her. It was always there, tucked in the space between them. “I would never ask you to face them.”

  “The last time I checked, you weren’t asking. I was telling.” Lee pulled Cade in close. “Come on. You go in alone you have . . . you. Go in with us, you have two brass pilots, a ship that adores you, a best friend who won’t leave your side. And a secret weapon.”

  “A . . . what?” Renna wasn’t outfitted with weapons.

  “Gori.”

  All heads swiveled in a new direction.

  “I have agreed to help,” he said. “With the navigation.”

  “He has a direct line to dark energy,” Lee said. “And dark energy expands the universe. If we get too close to a black hole, he can push it in a helpful direction.”

  Cade was the one who stared at him now, unblinking.

  “I know you said you could do more with dark energy, but . . .” It felt absurd to even think it. “You can move a black hole?”

  Lee leaned in and said, “He can nudge it.”

  Gori inclined his head.

  Cade was amazed. That Gori could do it, and that Gori would do it for her. She must have gained a degree of respect when he invited her into his mind.

  Cade looked down the line of people, human and not-so-human, who were ready to face the underworld so she could make it out alive. She felt all of her arguments slipping from her on a long fade-out.

  “All right,” she said. “We go in together.”

  CHAPTER 18

  EQUIFINALITY: A given end state or outcome approached through many different paths

  Cade sat in the pilot’s seat, her connection with Xan so open that sometimes she couldn’t tell whose skin was whose, if she was in his little room or the control room or both.

  Xan breathed easier now, his bruises faded, his mind eased by her presence. She did her best to soothe him, like a hand at the small of the back. She didn’t tell him when she saw the first of the palm-shaped ships.

  Now that she was so close to Xan, she’d been expecting some kind of pull to manifest—an undeniable force that would drag her to him like a magnet over this last reach of space.

  Instead, he gave her coordinates.

  Long strings of numbers that she didn’t understand, but which she fed to Rennik. He stood in the starglass with the chart in one hand and a pencil in the other, turning to face this black hole or that black hole to calculate their distance, their diameter, their pull. Ayumi stood at the control panels, dialing. Her fingers sure, her steps balanced. Cade had poured music—loud music—into Ayumi’s ears for as long she could before they both had to take their stations.

  The plan was for Renna to charge straight for wherever Xan was being held, while Ayumi flew a trickier, more roundabout route and came up on him from another angle. Now that Cade knew she had ammunition against Ayumi’s spacesick, that part of the plan felt a lot firmer under her feet. Renna, Lee, and Rennik would keep most of the Unmakers occupied, and Ayumi would be able to brush off the few ships on her tail.

  In theory.

  “Cadence, do you see that?” Ayumi asked, nodding out the starglass at the ship.

  And then it turned into ten ships, twenty ships, fifty. She and Ayumi should have broken off by now. A fleet of the Unmakers sailed up to them from three sides and then a string pulled around the back, flanking them. Two ships locked them in above and below, for good measure.

  Cade burrowed deep into the connection with Xan. But she wasn’t safe there, either. Not with Unmakers posted outside the door. Xan’s fear had drained away a long time ago, but Cade’s was fresh and bright, like blood from a bitten lip.

  Lights blinked on all of the ships—tiny, yellow, out of time with each other.

  The Unmakers wanted to board.

  “We can’t let them,” Cade said.

  She was too close. Entanglement had gotten her off Andana, through troubles, into more troubles, out of them again. She had risked herself and cracked open her mind and stretched her life to fit the new people she needed, like fingers reaching for an impossible chord.

  “We try to deny them, they blow us up,” Lee said. “We try to scamper away, they blow us up.”

  “T
hose are armed ships,” Rennik said.

  “Heavily armed ships,” Lee said.

  Ayumi called back from her place at the dials, the needles flying under her hands. “I would have to advise that we stick to the plan.”

  But the coordinates were still flooding Cade’s brain, and Ayumi’s ship sat on Renna’s far side, trapped.

  How much more? she tried to ask Xan.

  But he was so intent on getting her there that he didn’t listen. He thought numbers at her with a fury. She knew what those numbers meant.

  Get here. Now. Get here. Now.

  The ships moved in close—they lobbed themselves at Renna in quick, obvious jolts. Renna wasn’t armed, and even if she was, the fight would be fifty to one.

  “We’ll have to face them,” Rennik said.

  Lee sprang out from the corner where she’d been standing with Gori. “Face them how? They come in, they kill us, end of story.” Lee knew that ending perfectly. Rennik’s skin went to ash.

  “Ayumi’s right,” Cade said. “We stick to the plan.”

  The ship rocked with the first of the boardings. The Unmakers had latched one of their craft to the secondary dock and would come in through the cargo hold. Which meant that no one could head down the chute without slamming into them.

  But when the ship rocked a second time, that’s just what Ayumi did.

  “No time like the present!” she cried.

  Rennik rushed from the starglass to the control panels. Gori stayed put in his corner. Lee ran for Cade, her legs stretching, body electrified.

  “Cade.” Lee took the last of the room in one long stride, her arm shooting out to grab Cade’s wrist. “Listen!” Her dark-moon eyes swelled with twin oceans. “You’re not allowed to die.”

  Cade grabbed Lee’s hand, pulsed a message. A right-back-at-you. And she ran down the chute.

  “Cadence!” Rennik’s voice followed her, but he stayed at the panels. There was no way to engineer a goodbye. If his hands left the dials, the whole ship might spin into a black hole before he could right the course.

  Cade didn’t have time to think about that lost moment, but she could feel the lack of it, like the ache of her missing tooth.